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Your website is an important touch point in the customer cycle. It’s one of the most significant connections you have with them in this digital age. But, most business owners who handle their own website have no idea of how to utilize this connection, leading to mistakes and challenges that impede their business.
What site owners don’t realize is they can control most of these challenges and use them to optimize a better website. These common challenges go beyond the design of the site—you need to cover a lot more ground to fix your site and up its performance.
Let’s outline the common challenges that site owners face and how to deal with them:
1. My Website Has Low traffic
It takes time to get traffic, and this depends on many ranking factors. But, if your site has been up for almost six months and still not getting a boost in traffic, you need to look into the following factors:
- The quality of your content – Is your content relevant to the interest of your target audience? Does it follow the best copywriting practices? Is your content unbiased, fresh, and well-researched?
- Your keyword list – What is the level of competition for the keywords you are targeting? Are you targeting the right keywords for the right pages?
- Site speed and performance – How long does it take for your website to load? Is your website easily accessible? Do visitors have a hard time navigating your site?
When it comes to traffic, the key is to create a strategy that aligns with the factors above. Evaluate your site to fix problem areas and make sure every element is functioning optimally.
Your focus should be on visitors with significant commercial intent, so you can convert them into paying customers. One of the easiest ways to do this is by providing promotions. Promotions give way to mutual reciprocation—you win their trust with promos, and they win value from your website.
2. My Website Has Mismatched Pagination
Most site owners apply pagination to split content into several pages. This only works if the page has too many items, making it slow to load—as in the case of most ecommerce websites. Nonetheless, some site owners apply this on their blog posts to increase page views. The downside is this impedes the experience and creates a barrier for visitors.
With mismatched pagination, the content becomes diluted so each page makes less sense and holds fewer keywords. This affects the rankings of your website, as the pages tend to receive less link juice and encounter crawling and indexing issues.
When applying pagination, increase the number of categories for your pages and the items that appear on each page. This decreases the depth of the paginated series and the total number of pages that will appear.
3. My Website Has a Slow Server
A basic HTML site takes two to three seconds to load, while complex sites can take around seven seconds. Both are within the optimal loading time, as this is the expected attention span of visitors. If your website has a slow server, this affects the site’s usability and experience.
While a slow website server may be due to front-end issues, too many single-line codes, content assets, plug-ins, and other backend bottlenecks can also be a burden to the server. Here are a few aspects you need to look at:
- Programs or processes running on the site (scripts, images, etc.)
- Server resources (memory and bandwidth caps)
- Memory leaks
- Inconsistent website response times
By investigating these points, you can easily identify the performance blockers and implement long-term fixes to up your site’s speed.
4. My Content Management System is Not Updated
Most website developers create new software to replace old versions of content management systems. The problem is that some of them don’t have the time or resources to support the old versions they put up. This could be a problem for site owners who didn’t handle the development of their website for two reasons: 1.) Their site is no longer secure and 2.) It will be costly to migrate their existing website to another system.
The game plan for this type of situation is foresight. When you’re at the early stages of developing the site, you need to plan for upgrades and set aside a budget. For DIYers or new site owners, it would be wiser to outsource this task to a company that has a streamlined upgrade and back-up process. This makes it easier to get the site back up in case of unexpected downtimes.
The real challenge of any site owner is making their website usable. Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and consider their needs before you decide to launch a website. Once you clarify your goals, you can overcome the horror stories of website challenges and drive a steady stream of traffic to your site.
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